transcurrents

Jim Spain and the Ethnic Problem

January 26th, 2008

by Izeth Hussain

There have been several obituary tributes paid in the newspapers to the late US Ambassador Jim Spain. This is understandable because Spain chose to spend many years of his retirement in Sri Lanka, showing thereby that he had a real affection for this country and its people, and that certainly has been comforting to many of us who have felt dismayed by Sri Lanka`s rather poor international image. Evidently he was loved by his many friends for his exceptional human qualities. What interests me is that he was also seen as exemplifying the best of America.

In this article I will focus on my official relations with Spain, which suggest that he played a far more important role in the developments leading to the Peace Accords of 1987 than is realized. But first I will make some remarks on him as an emblematic personage, someone who stood for what is decent and wholesome in America, the opposite of the greedy and brutal America that has provoked a visceral anti-Americanism on a global scale.

The latter America can be clearly seen in the American performance over Iraq. It has left over 600,000 Iraqi deaths, possibly over a million, and around 4 million internally and externally displaced persons. Furthermore there is the distinct prospect of Iraq breaking up into three separate countries. All that horror has been visited on the heads of a people who were simply going about their business, without posing a threat to any foreign country, under a dictator who did not have possession of a single weapon of mass destruction. All that represents arguably the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated in the entirety of history. The horror of Iraq should be seen in the perspective of all the other horrors perpetrated by the Americans, beginning with the genocide against the Red Indians.

But there is also another America, a civilized one, that made New York the world capital of the visual arts after the Second World War, and created a great literature which included the greatest English-language poet of the second half of the last century, Robert Lowell. The political expression of that America is to be found in the fact that a cardinal place has been given in US foreign relations to democracy and human rights. Certainly there have been hypocrisy and double standards in the pushing of democracy and human rights. But those very precious positives have to be seen as there at the core of America, right from the time of the declaration of independence from Britain, and the Americans seem to really want those positives to provide the moral and civilizational validation to their super-power status. That is why they intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo to save people from their impending genocidal fates. In neither place were US interests-economic, political, strategic-involved to any significant extent.

I come now to Jim Spain in relation to our ethnic problem. As second-in-command in the Foreign Ministry from the beginning of 1986 to late 1988 I interacted often with Spain, his very able second-in-command Ed Marks, and other members of his staff. I also headed talks with several American delegations which came to Colombo during that period. American interest in our ethnic problem at that time was focused almost exclusively on the human rights aspect of the problem-or so it seemed to me. What struck me most was that there was nothing censorious in the American approach to the problem. Instead, there seemed to be an understanding that armed forces without a tradition of dealing with conflict situations could find it difficult to avoid excesses. The impression was given of American goodwill and an underlying willingness to help us. All that could have been influenced by the role played as Ambassador by Jim Spain.

But I was mistaken in my initial impression that the American interest was focused almost entirely on the human rights aspect of the ethnic problem, with everything else tangential to that aspect. I began to suspect after some time that the centre of American interest was really elsewhere because of Spain’s constant reiteration to me that his Government did not want Trinco, meaning that it was not interested in having a base in Trincomalee. Other members of his staff also used to exclaim, “We don’t want Trinco.” I needed no persuasion on that point because it always seemed to me a ridiculous expectation that we could give the US a base in Trinco and then ask the Indians to go to hell. I always believed that India would be prepared to occupy Sri Lanka militarily and fight a war to prevent any other country establishing a base in Trinco. But evidently illusions about the potential usefulness of Trinco as a counter against India persisted at the top decision-making levels of the SL Government, and the Americans were deeply concerned about it. I also came to form the impression that the Americans had at one time fostered that illusion and came to feel remorseful about having wrecked Sri Lanka’s relations with India as a consequence.

My argument will make sense if it is seen in the perspective of developments in Afghanistan since the late `seventies. After having installed a communist regime in Kabul, the Soviet Union thought it necessary in 1979 to send in its troops to bolster its puppet regime. Archival material released since the collapse of the Soviet Union shows that its enterprise in Afghanistan was really of a defensive order, since it was motivated by anxieties that the US and the West would shortly use Islamic fundamentalism to destabilize the Central Asian Republics. But no one believed it at that time, apart from the Soviet satellites and India. The rest of the world saw the Soviet Union as engaging in aggressive expansionism. The US and Pakistan were on one side, the Soviet Union and India on the other, and South Asia had become an area of great power rivalry as never before. It was at that moment that the then SL Government chose to get closer and closer to the US, inevitably rousing dangerous anxieties in India. The virtual support of India for the LTTE over many years has to be seen in that context.

It should be understandable-given the fact of great power rivalry as never before in South Asia-that the US could have wanted to foster the illusion that Trinco could be made a trump-card against India with the help of the US. But in the course of the `eighties it became more and more apparent that it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. By 1985 there were clear signs of a US-Indian rapprochement taking place. There was no longer any prospect of using Trinco as a trump-card against India. But evidently foolish illusions on that point persisted among the top decision makers in Colombo. It was a situation in which the US could help-more perhaps than any other power-in bringing about an Indo-Sri Lanka rapprochement.

On the day of the air-drop in 1987 a clear sign was given that the US role over the ethnic problem was much more than that of a benign onlooker with not much more than a perfunctory interest in trying to ensure that human rights were respected. I am now going into oral history as it does not seem that the information I have has ever appeared in print up to now. On that morning Jim Spain sought a meeting with the Foreign Minister as he had to convey a very urgent message from his Government. My recollection is that the message consisted of three points. Firstly, the US Government believed that in turning back the Indian flotilla bearing food the Sri Lankan Government had missed an excellent opportunity of defusing an extremely dangerous situation. The second point was that on that day India was going to do something that would be extremely upsetting to Sri Lanka. The third point was that it was crucially important for the Sri Lankan side not to over-react in any way.

On the face of it, all that was happening was that the CIA had got hold of information about the forthcoming air-drop and the US Government was alerting us about it. But there was much more than that in the message. In saying that the Sri Lankan Government had missed an excellent opportunity of defusing a very dangerous situation, the US was conveying to us that international sympathies were not with Sri Lanka. In asking us not to over-react the US Government was playing an active role and trying to influence the course of events. It seems reasonable to think that the US was privy to a game-plan that was unfolding, which had its approval, and that it’s Ambassador was serving as the virtual emissary of the Indian Government.

Suddenly the diplomatic corps in Colombo was abuzz with rumors that an Indo-Sri Lanka agreement on the ethnic problem was about to be signed. The abrupt transition from warlike hostility to the friendliness implied by an agreement on a contentious problem was certainly very surprising. I told the then Foreign Secretary, W. T. Jayasinghe, that almost certainly a third party was involved acting as a catalyst to bring the two warring sides together. He was present at the signing ceremony and told me next morning that my guess was correct. Just after the signing of the documents was over, and the formal speeches were made, Jim Spain handed over an envelope to Rajiv Gandhi. Obviously it was a congratulatory and goodwill message from President Reagan. Clearly the contents of the agreement were already known to the US Government.

Dixit in his book Assignment Colombo says that just after the signing and the speeches Spain requested to be taken to Rajiv Gandhi so as to hand over the message from Reagan. He adds that it was obvious that despite the confidential nature of the Agreement President Jayewardene had conveyed its contents to the US Government through Spain. However, it is also obvious that the US Government saw no reason for clandestinity over its interest in the Agreement. Dixit brings out the curious detail that Spain had been instructed to hand over the message if possible even before the signing of the Agreement. I believe that the US was signaling to the international community that the Agreement, so far from representing a set-back for US diplomacy, was a triumph and that the Agreement had its full and enthusiastic support.

There are some lessons to be learnt from that phase of our ethnic problem. The Indian side in the diplomatic encounters had a high degree of Foreign Service expertise, the Sri Lankan side none whatever, except for a very brief period when Foreign Minister Hameed was brought into the picture prior to the air-drop. As long as prominence is given in our diplomacy to absurd figures like the then President’s son and even worse, his Private Secretary, Sri Lanka can expect to be worsted at practically every adversarial diplomatic encounter in the future. The second lesson is that the US had decided in the aftermath of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan that India was to be the South Asian regional great power in a new world order replacing the one initiated at San Francisco in 1945.

But what interests me most in this article which focuses on the US role in 1987 is the major reason behind the failure of the Peace Accords and the IPKF intervention. It can be seen as a specifically American type of failure. That superlative pragmatist and wise old statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, wrote in the second volume of his memoirs, “Many American leaders believed that racial, religious, and linguistic hatreds, rivalries, hostilities, and feuds down the millennia could be solved if sufficient resources were expended on them.” President Jayewardene, our Indian and American friends, all, all of them meant well, but they did not take sufficiently into account the horrible complexity of the ethnic factor. One who did so was a Tamil, Venkateswaran, the former Foreign Secretary who was removed from his post by Rajiv Gandhi. After the signing of the Agreement he remarked, “It will blow up in our faces.”

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